Read Online Drood by Dan Simmons - Free Book Online

stage that was already there and replacing it with a full-size one in the bay windows; having a musical score composed for the play and hiring an orchestra to perform it; hiring professionals to design and paint the elaborate scenic backdrops; spending a small fortune on costumes—he later bragged that we “polar explorers” in the production could walk straight from London to the North Pole in the authentic polar gear we were wearing; and, finally, supervising the theatrical gas lighting himself even while devising elaborate lighting effects that could simulate every hour of the odd polar day, evening, and sunlit Arctic night.
    Dickens himself brought a strange, intense, underplayed yet incredibly powerful realism to his essentially melodramatic role. In one scene, in which several of us attempt to restrain “Wardour” from running in anguish from the stage, the author warned us that he meant to “fight in earnest” and that we would have to use all our resources to stop him. This, as it turned out, was an understatement. Several of us were bruised and battered even before we had finished with rehearsals. His son Charley later wrote to my brother—
“He went at it after a while with such a will that we really did have to fight, like prize-fighters, and as for me, being the leader of the attacking party and bearing the brunt of the fray, I was tossed in all directions and have been black and blue two or three times before the first night of the performance arrived.”
    On opening night, our mutual friend John Forster read the prologue that Dickens had written at the last moment, attempting, as he so often did in his books, to be understood by all as he compared the hidden depths of the human heart to the terrible and frozen depths of the Arctic North—
    that the secrets of the vast Profound
    Within us, an exploring hand may sound,
    Testing the region of the ice-bound soul,
    Seeking the passage at its northern pole,
    Soft’ning the horrors of its wintry deep,
    Melting the surface of that “Frozen Deep”
    T HE TRAIN HAD COME into London, but I did not go on to Charing Cross. Not yet.
    The bane of my life was—is, ever shall be—rheumatical gout. Sometimes it is in my leg. More often it moves to my head, frequently lodging like a hot iron spike behind my right eye. I deal with this constant pain (and it
is
constant) through strength of personality. And opium taken in the form of laudanum.
    This day, before continuing with the errand on which Dickens had sent me, I took a cab from the station—I was too uncomfortable to walk farther—to a small chemist’s shop around the corner from my home. The chemist there (as with certain others within the city and elsewhere) knew of my battle with this pain and sold me ameliorative medicine in quantities generally reserved for physicians, or—to be specific—laudanum by the jug.
    I would venture the guess, Dear Reader, that laudanum is still used in your future day (unless medical science has come up with a common remedy even more efficacious), but in case it is not, let me describe the drug to you.
    Laudanum is simply tincture of opium distilled in alcohol. Before I began buying it in large quantities, I would—following my physician and friend Frank Beard’s advice—simply apply four drops of opium into a half- or full glass of red wine. Then it became eight drops. Then eight or ten drops twice a day with wine. Finally, I discovered that pre-mixed laudanum, as much opium as alcohol, it seems, was more effective on such unrelenting pain. In the past months I had begun what would become a lifelong habit of ingesting pure laudanum from a glass or from the jug itself. I confess that when I once drank such a full glass at home in front of the famous surgeon Sir William Fergusson—a person whom I certainly thought would understand the necessity for it—the doctor exclaimed that such an amount taken at once should have and could have killed everyone at the table. (I had